Check out and download here my two movies of how i went about modeling and adding detail to my dinosaur.

This is the image I have used for the Background. I'm addicted to mountain biking, picture taken by my friend with Sony R1 during one of our rides. I loved the foggy after-rain atmosphere, so I removed my self, and made space for Dinosaur.

Took some more photos containing fern out of my personal library (I'm addicted to photography as well). Later in process, I have "rotoscoped" ferns, so they fit nicely into final comp. And that was basically the photography part.

After exporting 5 different mat Cap material renders of Dinosaur to Photoshop, I started arranging blending effects throughout these five aligned images, until achieving desired look for further work.

To get the acceptable final output by playing with blending modes, I don't have any specific rules that I follow, you just play with it, changing them trough layers, and trough blending modes, until you get what you want. So, tomorrow, if I want to make another dinosaur, I guess I'm going to use completely different pattern in blending order.

After having base done, I'm duplicating this layer, from which I paint spots and stripes on the animal, to make it look more natural. I avoided clean look, wanted to make it look somewhat discreet, but at the same time vibrant. Also, have learned from my pet, bearded dragon that some reptiles tend to change colours depending on how they feel (happy / angry), or the outside factor like heath, humidity, or cold. So the fun factor was to imagine this dinosaur having number of colour outfits.

This is the POW render, to clear how model looks from different angles. For the final pose I have tilted the model slightly upwards, cause that angle looked better then the plane one.

After removing myself out of the equation, the BG was ready for adding the elements. I've started with dinosaur, then two layers of fern, reason I did two layers is, because later, I added layer of shadows, and second layer of painted evaporations and fog.

So, now that I have sorted some things, it was time to immerse Carnotaurus into the woods. It meant, I needed to find a way how to make this dinosaur appear as if he really is in that woods.